Astronauts onboard space stations, and particularly the International Space Station (ISS), must live and work under extreme external conditions for rather long time periods, of several weeks, months, or even years. For the personal protection of these astronauts, as well as the supervision and assurance of the success of the overall mission, it is therefore necessary to carry out a continuous monitoring of the medical or physical conditions of these astronauts.
The medical monitoring system to be used in the above-mentioned context must be small, portable, and operable by a single astronaut to which the system is connected. The monitoring of the physical or medical data provided by the respective sensors must be possible continuously while the astronaut is at any location within the space station, and also while the astronaut is carrying out extra vehicular activities (EVAs) outside of the space station. Thus, the system requires a remote monitoring capability. Moreover, such a system must be easily integratable into the already existing telecommunication infrastructure of the space station.
Such a remote medical monitoring system is also becoming the subject of increased interest in fields other than space medicine, such as in the fields of emergency medicine, sports medicine and leisure activity medicine, as well as for the real-time physical monitoring of persons engaging in sports and leisure time activities, for monitoring the overall fitness or the actual existing physical load being applied to or exerted by a person. In such fields, there is an ever increasing demand for the miniaturization of medical devices such as electrocardiographs (EKG) or pulse oximeters, for carrying out the medical monitoring functions, in order to achieve the greatest possible portability of such devices, and to make the use of such devices suitable in the greatest range of applications.
A range of devices already exists for carrying out such purposes, for example in the form of portable transient recorders. However, any such known devices or systems are essentially limited to the detection and monitoring of relatively few biomedical signals. The number of the sensors utilized in such systems is thus also comparatively limited, and the signal transmission of the biomedical signals from the sensor to a connected data logger as well as to a possibly provided process computer, is typically hard-wired, i.e. carried out by wire-based connections. In other words, the respective sensors are connected to the other evaluating, processing and recording devices by means of hard wired connections. If additional signals are to be measured, then the devices correspondingly become larger, or an additional data recorder must be used. For these reasons, the known devices and systems are not suitable, or can only be used with serious limitations, for an encompassing, location-independent, user-friendly, remote telemonitoring of a broad range of physical and/or medical parameters. Furthermore, such known systems are not well suited to be being reactively adapted to flexible and varied demands of the system.